Why use Agile Principles and Agile Methodology?

Is your organization trending toward Agile Project Management? Do you want to expand your skills to include Agile methodologies? Many organizations are adopting Agile methodologies to help increase team performance, improve customer satisfaction and increase project versatility. Organizations that have adopted Agile methodologies are able to respond to market dynamics and complete more of their projects successfully. Agile training is an ideal way to level-set your organization and project team on the foundations of Agile and associated implementation methodologies. Agile training can clear up many misconceptions and misunderstandings about the operations of Agile. It can also help expose the underlying Agile concepts and clarify the differences between the various implementation methods.

Often when organizations describe problems with "Agile" they are describing challenges with executing an Agile methodology. Having all project team members (both technical and business) attend common training, ideally in the same class, can eliminate some of these problems. The entire team should hear the same message, concepts, and implementation tactics creating a common language and perspective. This shared understanding strongly increases the probability of the team inspecting and adapting together using a common language and practices, thus reducing the conflicts in the future.

Whether you're looking for Agile certification to expand your personal Agile knowledge or to train multiple layers of your organization on Agile methodologies, we can get you up to speed quickly with our Agile training. We can teach you about all the principles and practices of Agile, including Scrum, XP and Lean.

What is Agile Project Management?

Agile project management is an iterative approach to product delivery that builds incrementally from the start of the project, instead of trying to deliver the entire product at once near the end. The approach is based on the Agile Manifesto (2001).

Agile works by breaking projects down into
little bits of user functionality, prioritizing
them, and then continuously delivering them
in 2-4 week cycles called iterations
or sprints.

Teams operate in short cycles aimed at
continuous improvement to develop only
what the users want. Work goals are defined
by the team before each cycle starts. The
team communicates directly with the customer if they have any questions concerning the function. The customer's priorities are analyzed by the Product Owner and fed into the team to keep them working on the highest priority items. The team estimates how much time work will take in an iteration, as well as how to do the work.

Performance is measured by customers at the end of the iteration. The lessons learned in each iteration are captured in retrospectives and used in future iterations. In this way, the products are constantly improved and the process for developing them also improved.

"I've taken 2 classes from Project Management Academy, the PMP training and the PMI-ACP (Agile) training. Both of my instructors were top notch and I believe my hard earned money was well spent by investing in these classes. The materials provided were excellent and supported my learning and test preparation. I was able to pass both exams on my first attempt. If I need further certifications in the future, I'll look to Project Management Academy first for the preparation classes."

--Holli

Benefits of Implementing Agile Methodologies

During the project, end-user involvement is encouraged, providing visibility and transparency. There is continuous planning and feedback throughout the process, delivering value to the business from the beginning of the project.

Companies embrace this idea of delivering business value early in the process making it easier to lower risks associated with development. Some of the main benefits of agile project management are:

High Product Quality

Regular testing to see that the product is working during the development

Defining and elaborating requirements just in time

Incorporating continuous integration and daily testing into the development process

Sprint retrospectives to continuously improve processes and work

Software is developed in incremental, rapid cycles.

Higher Customer Satisfaction

Demonstrating working functionalities to customers

Delivering products to market quicker and more often with every release

Keeping customers involved and engaged

Increased Project control

Daily Sprint meetings

Transparency though information radiators

Reduced Risks

Developing in sprints, ensuring a brief time between feature development

Agile gives freedom when recent changes need to be implemented

Adaptation to the client's needs and preferences through the development process

Faster ROI

Focusing on Business value allowing the client to determine the priority of features

Trending Articles

An Introduction to Agile Project Management

For many years, there has been a traditional method of project management based on the idea that the customer can know and define his or her requirements fully up front. While this is occasionally the case, very often customers either don't know precisely what they want or, more often, "will know it when they see it." Agile started to emerge... [Read more]

Embracing Agile

from the Harvard Business Review

Agile innovation methods have revolutionized information technology. Over the past 25 to 30 years they have greatly increased success rates in software development, improved quality and speed to market, and boosted the motivation and productivity of IT teams... [Read more at https://hbr.org/2016/05/embracing-agile]